The Humble Indie Bundle is back for a third round of pay-what-you-want, DRM- …

The latest edition of the Humble Indie Bundle—a pay-what-you-want sale that lets consumers decide how much money to give to developers and how much to donate to charities—has launched and already taken in more than $500,000.

While the previous edition of the bundle focused on one developer, Frozenbyte, the latest is once again offering five different games by five different indie developers. On offer this time are Crayon Physics Deluxe, Cogs, VVVVVV, HammerFight, and And Yet It Moves. As always, each game is DRM-free and available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Many of these games are making their debuts on new platforms as part of the promotion.

Humble Indie Bundle 3

With just under two weeks to go, more than 115,000 bundles have been sold for an average price of just under $5. So far the promotion has earned more than half a million dollars. As a display of just how great the indie gaming community can be, a number of the top donators are indie developers themselves, including Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson with over $4,000, Braid creator Jonathan Blow with more than $2,700, and SteamBirds creator Andy Moore with the mature total of $580.08 (think about it).

As per usual, the bundle asks buyers to divide up their donations however they see fit, divvying up funds between Child's Play, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the actual developers, and the Humble Bundle itself. Money donated to the bundle goes toward paying for expenses like bandwidth.

All together the five games would cost more than $50, but for the next 13 days you can pay what you like right here.

Bought it yesterday when I got their mail. I'm a huge fan of the Humble Bundles, and have participated in every one of them. It's a really great way to experience some games you otherwise wouldn't play.

Let's see how much they manage to collect this time!

(Oh, and the inclusion of Steam/Desura keys is really awesome as well)

That's great that they've been able to sell these games so much. I just hope we don't get a story next week about these same devs complaining about "OH MY GOODNESS, PIRACY!" like they did with the last Humble Indie Bundle.

I'll buy it as an excuse to donate to the charities again, but the game selection doesn't interest me much this time around. I previously tried the demos for AYIM and Hammerfight, and didn't care for them. Oh well.

Here's hoping for Super Meat Boy, Spacechem, Shatter, and some of my other favorites next time

I'm finally in a financial position to buy into these again (I don't want to drop $1, that's just lame; I pay a fair price for the games and charities). I never thought I'd say this but I probably won't be playing many of these games that much. Mostly because of work, I just don't have the time anymore. So I guess I finally bought the bundle as an excuse to support devs and charities rather than hunker down with games for hours. Unlike MoonShark though, I enjoyed AYIM's demo on the Wii.

Straight-line wrote:

That's great that they've been able to sell these games so much. I just hope we don't get a story next week about these same devs complaining about "OH MY GOODNESS, PIRACY!" like they did with the last Humble Indie Bundle.

1 of the games was available on Linux before the bundle: And Yet it Moves.

Note that there are currently (as of last night, at least) some issues with the new Linux ports.They do claim to be aware of the issues and working to address them!

Specifically:VVVVVV and Crayon Physics Deluxe are compiled to require libtiff4, which is not readily available on a standard Fedora 14 system.Cogs loads up to music and a black screen.Hammerfight is laggy enough to be barely playable.

I'm confident these issues will be taken care of, and do not begrudge my donation, but so far can only play AYIM. YMMV, but Fedora users should be aware of this to avoid potential disappointment.

That's great that they've been able to sell these games so much. I just hope we don't get a story next week about these same devs complaining about "OH MY GOODNESS, PIRACY!" like they did with the last Humble Indie Bundle.

I'm pretty sure that they've never done such a thing.

ArsTechnica, on the other hand, has written several pieces claiming that Pirates screw over such promotions. I'd hope one of the writers isn't brainless enough to do the same yet again.

I'm kind of happy that VVVVVVVVV(or however many "V"s there are) was the only one I didn't have already. I've been pining for Crayon Physics since the techdemo. :) (I'll be happier when Crayon is Mac side in Steam, as well.)

I'm not *always* so cheap; I already had all three of the FrozenByte games on Windows, and donated for the bundle to show my appreciation for the new Mac versions.

All but Cog work fine for me on Linux (my laptop doesn't have a GPU able to run Cog apparently). Hammerfight — a really pleasant surprise — has a really laggy intro streen for some reason but the game itself plays fine. You just need to make sure you set a fairly low dpi for your mouse (really move it around fast during calibration).

I'll buy it as an excuse to donate to the charities again, but the game selection doesn't interest me much this time around. I previously tried the demos for AYIM and Hammerfight, and didn't care for them. Oh well.

Okay I tried the other 3 demos (on Windows) so I'll just summarize my impressions of all the games:

Hammerfight only occupied a tiny part of my screen and relied on frankly bizarre mouse controls. It had a story I just couldn't give a damn about.

And Yet It Moves had some neat rotation-based puzzles but the audio was annoying and the springboards were aggravating.

Cogs was beautifully animated, but I detest those sort of sliding-block puzzles, especially when there's a timer.

VVVVVV was a mix of hardcore/oldskool challenge and seething frustration (damn platform timing, argh) but with an *awesome* chiptune soundtrack.

I fell in love with Crayon Physics. Whoops Lots of room to relax or get creative with that one.

Oddly, the theme this time seems to be "low resolution" -- none of the games seem to take advantage of a large widescreen monitor. Not that it really matters for the kinds of gameplay here, I guess (except for Hammerfight, which was actually difficult to see).

I got Hammerfight in one of the Steam indie packs a while back. It's one of the few games that I've categorised into the inglorious "Unplayably Bad" group in my Steam games list. Sad, really, it had quite a novel idea and I like the gladiatorial steampunk aesthetic. But it just isn't playable, and the fixed (very low) resolution graphics don't help it at all. The ridiculously high difficulty level, the physics feeling pretty broken, the AI being too superhuman, it just didn't work for me...

I got Hammerfight in one of the Steam indie packs a while back. It's one of the few games that I've categorised into the inglorious "Unplayably Bad" group in my Steam games list. Sad, really, it had quite a novel idea and I like the gladiatorial steampunk aesthetic. But it just isn't playable, and the fixed (very low) resolution graphics don't help it at all. The ridiculously high difficulty level, the physics feeling pretty broken, the AI being too superhuman, it just didn't work for me...

Did you try to go further than the first four/five missions ? I find them very hard, and quite frustrating, but after theses, the game starts to trully shine : you're a gladiator in small-sized arenas, and it's much more fun than protecting civilians/killing bigs bugs.

However, I agree that the fixed graphics are a pain (especially for me who has a 40' TV for PC monitor), but I still enjoy it too much to drop it only for that.

Yobgod, good point. Ubuntu 10.10, and all works fine. Well, except Cog, due to my using only intel integrated graphics, but I've never been a fan of sliding puzzle games so I don't feel too bad about it.

JanneM: What Distro do you use? Does it ship libtiff.so.4 by default? I was specific that it's an issue with Fedora 14, but others might like to know which systems it does work on.

I had the same issue on opensuse 11.4 - it ships with libtiff.so.3.9.4. I couldn't find a copy in the repos, and instead of compiling the source (it was late, I was tired), I just softlinked libtiff.so.4 to libtif.3.9. . . .

VVVVV works fine, Crayon Physics runs without sound . . . and crashes X when you quit. That allowed to play around for a bit, though a better solution from the devs would be appreciated . . .

I'm finally in a financial position to buy into these again (I don't want to drop $1, that's just lame; I pay a fair price for the games and charities). I never thought I'd say this but I probably won't be playing many of these games that much. Mostly because of work, I just don't have the time anymore. So I guess I finally bought the bundle as an excuse to support devs and charities rather than hunker down with games for hours. Unlike MoonShark though, I enjoyed AYIM's demo on the Wii.

Straight-line wrote:

That's great that they've been able to sell these games so much. I just hope we don't get a story next week about these same devs complaining about "OH MY GOODNESS, PIRACY!" like they did with the last Humble Indie Bundle.

The Humble FrozenByte Bundle? Where did that happen?

A dollar to charity is a dollar, even if you don't think it's worth the cost it's still a donation that helps If your really guilty about it you could just not play lol.